It’s a while since I wrote a proper post here: time has been scarce. To make up for it, here’s a bumper set of links on swearing from around the internet.
How much do we curse?
The ever-expanding Timelines of Slang.
Scheiße! Divergence in West Germanic faecal vocabulary.
‘You whose shit comes out leftwards!’ The grammar of Hua insults.
For your weekend ruding reading pleasure, a roundup of swearing-related stories and items from around the world.
Olaf doesn’t give a fuck.
An enlightened approach to children swearing.
The UK election campaign in The Thick Of It quotes.
‘Fuck This Court and Everything that it Stands For.’
For your weekend reading pleasure, a bumper batch of sweary shit from around the internet. You may have seen some of these items before, especially if you follow @stronglang on Twitter, but I bet there’s something new here even to devotees.
Romance writer KJ Charles has a great defence (and examination) of swearing in fiction, showing its importance in conveying character and mood, among other things.
I’m not ashamed of my name, says Mr Fuck (pronounced ‘foo-key’).
Swearwords help boost awareness of sign language at Adelaide Fringe festival.
There’s been a lot of anger and sarcasm in bookish circles at the ‘Clean Reader’ app that (ineptly) replaces profanities and vulgarities with sanitised alternatives: ‘chickenshit bullshit’, as Strong Language‘s @VoxHiberionacum pithily described it. Lionel Shriver has a smart response in the Guardian:
The sweary links are arriving thick and fast these days. Here’s a fresh batch of foul-mouthed items of interest.
The Globe and Mail, having published the band name Fucked Up, robustly defends the decision.
It wasn’t all nasty, brutish and short. Countering the myth of Anglo-Saxon swearing.
Finding the poetry in Kim Sears’ profanity.
Strong Language 